Here is my solution to the sleep problem. Below is the email communication with Intel Support regarding this issue:

Intel received the following email from you:

Re: {ticketno:[8000480038]} - Your Intel Customer Support Inquiry

Fred,

Thank you for your advice and options for trouble shooting. We found a solution to the sleep issue by replacing the motherboard with the ASUS P9X79 Pro.

All of the steps below have been addressed. 3 different power supplies, different RAM configurations, default settings in bios, latest BIOS updated, custom settings, all drivers checked and triple checked update? ALL result in system hang on sleep where hibernation is turned off. The machine, like many others in forums all over the internet will not use S3 sleep mode without crashing or hanging either on first or second try... it behaved the exact same way no matter what was tried.

I would like to say something that I hope you can take to a meeting and discuss with your colleagues. You are dealing with a LONG time Intel fan. I have built MANY systems over the years and not once did I ever have an issue like this. The one time I recommend an Intel board to a friend, it fails miserably and caused at least 40 hours between us of late night trouble shooting and time and gas wasted on trips to the PC store thinking "it can't be the Intel board". I am furious about this and I will most likely never buy an Intel made board again as a result. We are exhausted and frustrated with a ruined experience of building your own machine from the "finest" quality components only to have the joy that comes with complete install to become a nightmare of 2 am endless hour of stress trying to figure out how to make something work the way it should right out of the box.

Intel needs to pay attention to the forums and stop acting like its the customers fault and that they don't have the capacity to make sure things are correctly matched and setup properly. The BIOS in the DX79si is dysfunctional and LAME.

2)Other troubleshooting steps I recommend is testing the system with just one memory module at a time. I recommend trying at least two memory modules but, always one at a time.

3)We have identified different issues between some Corsair power supplies and our motherboards so; if it is possible for you to use another power supply from another manufacturer it would be great.

4)I recommend testing the system in basic configuration which is using just processor, processor fan, one stick of RAM, power supply, monitor, keyboard, mouse and the Hard Drive. I recommend disconnecting everything else like other SATA drives, USB drives, etc.

5)I would like to know if you get any error message or any sound coming from the motherboard when the issue happens.

Important note: Should you need further assistance from us regarding your inquiry, we would highly appreciate if you could simply reply to this email of ours, instead of sending a brand new email, unless it is a different issue/inquiry. Thus, we will be avoiding duplicate incoming emails, and we will not lose track of the email thread.

I bought this board (DX79SI) earlier this week and experienced the same problems described above. After much experimentation, it looks to me like the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility is the culprit.

I start with a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1, no patches applied. Latest BIOS and drivers (as of 7/20) from the Intel Website. Latest versions of IDU and XTU installed.

After booting, but before running XTU, sleep works fine. I can successfully put my machine to sleep manually, and it will sleep successfully per the Windows sleep settings. Wakes up with a keyboard press every time. Sleeps and wakes up successfully with hybrid and non-hybrid sleep modes. I have run through all these steps multiple times, and have had no issues.

Next, start XTU. Then exit. No need to do any tweaking or run any stress tests. Simply start the program, and then exit.

Manually put the system to sleep, and the problems begin, exactly as several have described in this thread. The power button blinks, the screen goes black, but the fans continue to run. The only escape from this state is to turn off the power supply, or hold the power button to turn off the power.

This is easily repeatable with both the current and previous versions of XTU.

I haven't reported this to Intel support yet, but plan to do so. In the meantime, I'd be curious to know if anyone else can replicate my steps above, with or without success.

One more thing, are you able to change the boot drive priority ? With bios 515 and 525, i am not able the change the sequence of the boot priority, it always go for the optical drive, then USB then hard drive With optical drive and usb boot disabled, the hard drive boot priority can not be changed neither (I have 3 hard drives installed).

As for the wake up from sleep, I am currently have hibernation enabled, so everytime the comptuer goes to sleep, i will press on the power button till it shuts off, then turn it back on, WIndows will 'resume' from hibernation...

3.. press any keys, windows wakes up and goes right into the login page

With XTU running, i am able to wake up windows from user initiated sleep as well.

However, with windows initiated sleep, i am not able to wake up the computer whatsoever, the only to wakes it up is to press and hold on the power button until it goes into hibernation, then power it back on again,

(note, if hibernation is turned off (powercfg.exe /hibernate off ), pressing and hold on the power button will cause windows to shut off, and when you restart it, windows will complain it did not shut down properly)

Interesting, I haven't tried hiberbate mode, either before or after starting XTU. I'll try that and see what happens. But Sleep and Hybrid Sleep definitely appear to be getting screwed by something XTU is doing. I've tested multiple additional times since I posted, and it's perfectly repeatable: Works fine before starting XTU, goes into "zombie" mode after starting XTU.

On the boot order, I haven't tried changing it. Mine's been in UEFI Boot mode from Day 1, so I always hit F10 at the BIOS Splash Screen to select an alternate boot device if I need to. With UEFI enabled, I think the BIOS will only consult the boot order list if it doesn't find any UEFI-bootable devices.

"(note, if hibernation is turned off (powercfg.exe /hibernate off ), pressing and hold on the power button will cause windows to shut off, and when you restart it, windows will complain it did not shut down properly)"

@ sumyumguy: pressing and holding the power button for >4 sec is no winodws shut down. its a hard switch off of all powers done by the motehrboard (or psu...i dont know exactly).

So the windows message that it did not shut down proper is correct.

By the way i did flash to bios 5.25 but with that after waking up my computer from hibernation it took about 1 min and my computer was getting slower and slower (i heard it during playing a movie. was kinda fun :-) and computer froze. only a hard switch off by holding the power button >4 sec helped out.

So i did go back to 4,92 and all is working well so far (from hibernation point of view)

I never installed XTU but had installed Intel desktop utils some times. At that time I thought that the smbus driver caused some instability and deinstalled the utils.

MY Windows Power Options:

sleep - sleep after 15mins

- allow hybrid sleep: off

- hibernate after 60min"

- Allow wake timers: Enabled

Power buttons and lid - Power button action: Hibernate

- Sleep button action: Sleep

if i allow "hybrid sleep mode": after waking up from hybernation i get a error message that the firmware of my system (bios of my dx79si ) did not keep the memory allocation table (or something like that).

Well, for what it's worth, I submitted a ticket to Intel on this issue today, with the details of my configuration and how easy it is to consistently reproduce it with XTU. I've been experimenting with this since last Saturday, and as I mentioned, sleep and hybrid sleep work perfectly as long as I don't run XTU. Start and exit from XTU, and sleep fails.

I don't know if I'll get any kind of response, but if I do, I'll post it here.

I've also noticed an issue with RSTe drivers and SMART reporting not working. But I guess that would be a topic for another thread.

I just stumbled on this thread...I was having the same issues you describe. In my troubleshooting, I started with msconfig, services tab, hide all Microsoft services, and then I unticked the extreme tuning utility (its status was showing as running). I restarted and then manually selected sleep - success! I woke it up, and let it enter sleep state normally - success! I uninstalled XTU and haven't had a repeat of any sleep issue. I guess I got lucky by picking the XTU first and I don't really miss it.

If you haven't noticed, the new version of RSTe fixes SMART reporting and SSD toolbox functionality.

The XTU issue was a showstopper for me, as I wanted to be able to tune settings within Windows. So I took advantage of the Microcenter return policy, took the DX79SI board back, and exchanged it for an ASUS P9X79 board instead. The ASUS Ai II utilities work fine and never seem to cause any similar issues (or any issues at all).

Before deciding to return the Intel board, I did open a case with Intel support, but haven't heard a peep from them.

The RSTe issue is also present with the ASUS board, as I'm sure all the board manufacturers use the Intel-provided drivers. I'll give the new driver a try, sounds like it will help. Just to confirm, it's 3.2.0.1135, released August 9?